An Incomplete Introduction
Along the literary highway known as contemporary Philippine poetry in English, how vital is the decade-long stretch from 1998 to 2008? Is it one to drive through and past, the scenery redundant, the standards on a loop, playing in the background? Is it one to careen through, windows down, volume up, the landscape breaking into versions, staccato, simultaneous, the mind aflutter, schizophrenic, fried? Is it one perpetually plagued by traffic, by roadblocks, by wayward cops? Does the decade invite tuning in or out?
For the reader perpetually in search of the new, the best bets to keep the drive interesting are bound to be voices literally never heard before. In the case of readers such as myself who do enjoy reading poets piecemeal but find far more pleasure in engaging with bodies of work, the best introductions to these voices come in the form of reading their first books, where the encounter is thorough enough to achieve a respectable intimacy with the poet’s sensibility and to justify whatever tone—dismissive, appreciative, fanatic, lukewarm—critique takes. How this decade fares against earlier decades in the production of poetry by newcomers, I have yet to investigate, and while the discomforts that come with busting one’s critical chops in studying the work of one’s generation or the generation prior are multiple—whether caused by a vantage point restricted by proximity or a culture of cliques, to name a few—it seems to be an endeavor far more necessary than yet again another contribution to studies of writers long dead, canonized, or simply, already read.
What kinds of poetry are being published by emerging poets today—many of whom are products of creative writing programs here and abroad and various national writers workshops, taught by senior writers who, in one breath, propagate their aesthetic of choice and wax nostalgic about the good old days when they were left to their own devices, with no such institutions to oversee their literary development? Based on the visibility, in the last ten years, of those who are young in the career of publishing books of poetry—be it through early acclaim, notoriety, or the single-minded, earnest, ambitious work of writing poetry never written before and carving out new spaces in which to produce and publish it—where is the poetry highway headed? “The sad fact is that most of the poems getting published these days—bearing marks of schooling (or nearly so) and threats of competence and talent aborning—are insufferably mediocre and lazy,” says Ricardo de Ungria in his introduction to the 1999 Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction. After a rundown of the various manifestations sloppy writing takes he declares that “they all [the poems] look and sound alike, aspiring for a generic so-so poem that anyway gets published just the same” and laments that “democratizing access to writing (evident in the proliferation of writing courses and degrees and workshops has come down to—vapidity: all steam and no heat; or all heat and no fire.” Later in the essay, de Ungria applauds the precious few “old-guard work continu[ing] to dominate the field.” How pertinent are these scathing assertions a decade later? What I hope to do in a series of essays on contemporary Philippine poetry in English is sift through the noise and sporadic conversations and, by way of the first books of poets published in the last ten years, offer a map of what and how we are currently, and where we may be going.
Where and how begin then, in the face of a decade’s worth of first books? This, after all, is the decade that begins at the tail end of A Habit of Shores (1999), the final installment of Gemino H. Abad’s three-volume anthology spanning roughly a hundred years of “Filipino Poetry and Verse from English,” by far the most extensive mapping out of our poetic terrain. A potential route springs directly from the clearing provided by A Habit of Shores, a survey of those who, for better or worse, have been tagged by Abad as presences in such a landscape, examining the first books of poetry released by these authors in the decade that followed, a number of which came out in 1998 alone? Another route might be hammered out of the conflicts and challenges in poetry publishing, casting side by side the poetry books of university presses or commercial publishers known for literary titles (such as Anvil Publishing) and that of independent publishers, where the output ranges from the handsomely produced books of “difficult” (as it has often been described) poetry by the small press High Chair, notable for its peculiar dedication to publishing only poetry books, to the poems enclosed in the ubiquitous long-necked animal pattern covers of Giraffe Books, to the wild cards coming out of CentralBooks or the Makiling High School for the Arts, to a smattering of poetry books released by printers, it seems, or publishers possibly small and certainly not known for literature—Big Dipper Print House, Near Sun Publications, Z Multi-Media Corp, Asia Speedy Print Centers, and ProQuest Publishing, to name a few. An obvious possibility involves the usual suspects, Palanca award-winning collections eventually compiled and expanded into first books, or debut books of poetry honored with National Book Awards in the last decade, of which there are (so far) four. A less-than-obvious one ditches full-length collections in favor of chapbooks, such as the four titles released by High Chair and four others by the NCCA under their Ubod Chapbook Series. How about a starting point situated in distant shores, in the form of work by our hyphenated poets—Bino Realuyo, for example, whose first book of poetry, first published in 2006 in the US, was published in the Philippines by Anvil two years later, or Eileen Tabios, also Filipino-American and based in the US, whose first book of poetry was released in 1998, also by Anvil? Or situated in the distant past, say, the resurrected work of the poet Diana Gamalinda, who died in the 1970s, at the onset of a possibly interesting writing career, her first and only book of poems published decades later, in 1998?
In a country with a population of about 90 million and counting, the print runs of literary titles, at typically 500 to 1,000 copies, reflects an audience that is, to say the least, very, very limited. If the reading public (market) is small, the portion of the reading public made up of poetry readers is even smaller. “I do think there’s a point at which the text loses something when it tries to appeal to a couple hundred thousand people all at once,” says John D’Agata, and while there is no denying the truth in his words, there are times when few seems too few. In the tiny local literary world, of which those writing poetry make up a mere fraction, the situation can be downright incestuous: writers writing to and for each other, writers reading each other’s work, writers writing about each other. On the other hand, James Longenbach says, “it’s difficult to complain about poetry’s expanding audience [in the US], but it’s more difficult to ask what a culture that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and large and been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness: its strangeness, its propensity to defeat its own expectations, its freedom to explore new (or old) linguistic avenues without necessarily needing to worry about economic success.” In the absence of the need to please and perform, the poet gains more agency to speak the unspeakable, to attempt the unfamiliar and unpalatable, to do away with scripted outcomes and foregone conclusions. What Longenbach envisions, of course, is an artistic ideal, a potential antidote to incestuous practices under conditions conducive to such; the poet, I think, turns the same scheme into the most unproductive of situations when he or she lapses into narcissism, a typical consequence of work praised, ego massaged, and back-and-then-some scratched by like-minded (mindless) individuals. In other words, press release in place of critique. If, in 1931, Jose Garcia Villa wrote, “It is, I think, time now that we had criticism of local poetry… Without criticism there would be no discrimination between the worthy and the unworthy; and without this conscious discrimination, little advance is possible”; and if, in 2003, Marc Gaba wrote, “When a self is forced to feign appreciation and give such works attention (sad customary practice in Philippine Contemporary Lit survey classes, where often even the teachers don’t like what they’re teaching), I think it becomes crucial to ask in what name that pretending is being done. Nationalism? ‘Friendship’? Good morals and right conduct?”, it is clear that self-awareness in the practice of poetry remains erratic at best. If we are to converse with ourselves, then let us at least own up to its causes and consequences, and if we are to honor the work of poetry, then let us look outward, treat as fact Gaba’s words—“what the poem wants is a readership through time attuned to its voice—not a prize, if they are not the same and they are not”—and aspire accordingly.
